About

A ‘state of the craft’ exhibition surveying contemporary quilt-making at the newly opened Batsford Gallery. Building upon a resurgence of interest in quilts as functional art, five artists with distinctive practices demonstrate the pliancy of a form which stretches from contemplative colour study to organic abstraction and the avant-garde.

A quilt is multilayered, complex in both material and meaning. It is intimate and public, autobiographical and communal. It can be didactic or celebratory; rhythmic and mathematical in form or freehand, figurative, functional. Quilts connect us all by threads and scraps to memory and narrative, to traces of community and history. They are a practice, a language, a material culture that can be endlessly revived, reworked and, as here, renewed.

The artists share a deep engagement with the materiality of cloth as the springboard for expression, present in each act of cutting, placing, layering and stitching which, finally, forms a coherent whole.

Catherine Marie Longtin draws on minimalist abstract art in a conversation between material and technique, concept and form, reference and creation.

Julius Arthur’s work blurs the boundary between art and function; objects bear meaning through their connection with the day-to-day.

Sophie Giller’s work emphasises process, labour, craft, care, domesticity, emotion and the social history of everyday materials.

Adam Herbert embraces and celebrates small mismatches of pattern which show the hand of the maker.

In Kate Williams’ large quilted panels, imagined architectural forms cast high-key shadows in desaturated, empty landscapes.

The Batsford Gallery is a new East London gallery space launched by Batsford Books, a leading publisher of art books, specialist in textiles and applied arts and originator of the Batsford Prize. The bright, airy space is located between Broadway Market and Columbia Road, and showcases work by leading artists, makers and designers.